Computer Viruses: Is Your Computer Being Faithful?

In computer security, a computer virus is a self-replicating computer program that spreads by inserting copies of itself into other executable code or documents. A computer virus behaves in a way similar to a biological virus, which spreads by inserting itself into living cells. Extending the analogy, the insertion of a virus into the program is termed as an infection, and the infected file, or executable code that is not part of a file, is called a host. Viruses are one of the several types of malicious software or malware. In common parlance, the term virus is often extended to refer to worms, Trojan horses and other sorts of malware; viruses in the narrow sense of the word are less common than they used to be, compared to other forms of malware.

While viruses can be intentionally destructive, for example, by destroying data, many other viruses are fairly benign or merely annoying. Some viruses have a delayed payload, which is sometimes called a bomb. For example, a virus might display a message on a specific day or wait until it has infected a certain number of hosts. A time bomb occurs during a particular date or time, and a logic bomb occurs when the user of a computer takes an action that triggers the bomb. The predominant negative effect of viruses is their uncontrolled self reproduction, which wastes or overwhelms computer resources. Today, viruses are somewhat less common than network-borne worms, due to the popularity of the Internet. Anti virus software, originally designed to protect computers from viruses, has in turn expanded to cover worms and other threats such as spyware, identity theft and adware.

The word virus is often claimed to be the acronym of Vital Information Resources



Under Siege, although this is obviously a backronym. The word is derived from and is used the same sense as the biological equivalent. The term virus is often used in common parlance to describe all kinds of malware, including those that are more properly classified as worms or Trojans. Most popular anti virus software packages defend against all of these types of attack. In some technical communities, the term virus is also extended to include the authors of malware, in an insulting sense.

In order to avoid detection by users, some viruses employ different kinds of deception. Some old viruses, especially on the MS-DOS platform, make sure that the last modified date of a host file stays the same when the file is infected by the virus. This approach usually does not fool anti virus software.


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